What Type Of Content Can Be Monetized?
5 years ago content monetization on YouTube still had some mystery to it, however today it is rather straightforward. A YouTube creator can either build an audience of 1,000 subscribers who have watched 4,000 hours of content in the past 12 months, or apply and join a network that will manage all aspects of monetization on their behalf. What I find most interesting now is not so much the “how to monetize” or even the quest for higher CPMs, but the wide array of “what gets monetized” on YouTube.” I love the puzzle of figuring out the many ways content can be sliced-and-diced, repackage, resold, resurrected, and so on. Let’s consider three of the ways content can be repurposed.
1. Archives
Whether it’s the film, television, or music industry there is a tendency to focus on fresh content for obvious reasons. Think how bored you’d have been over this past year if that weren’t the case. However there is also a degree of neglect that exists with older content based on the assumption that content is perishable. You think nobody cares anymore that Hulk Hogan beat Andre the Giant at the Wrestlemania III main event in 1987, or that Stevie Wonder performed “Superstition” on Sesame St. in 1973? 10s of Millions of YouTube users would disagree. YouTube has brought new life back into countless pieces of content that have otherwise been forgotten.
2. Creating short– out of long–form content
Another misconception about YouTube content is that the consumption behavior of its user base parallels traditional media formats. The average length of a YouTube video is ~11 minutes with the most popular YouTube videos being even shorter. The possibilities are endless when it comes to extracting short-form pieces out of long-form content. Rights holders of long-form content have had great success distributing clips of content such as: interview segments, comedy bits from a full special, a play highlight from a sporting event, a scene from a movie, etc.
3. Claiming your content in other content
If editing and distributing content in the manner discussed above resembles “work” that you would rather not do, then you can let someone else extract and upload their favorite clips of your content and simply claim & monetize it through a Content ID administrator such as Muserk. Claiming and monetizing user generated content (UGC) alone on YouTube has created a revenue stream worth billions of dollars for rights holders. To give you an idea of how deep this can get, consider the following:
A rockabilly band with some popularity in the 1990s happened to get a song placed on a show in the 2010s which Justin Bieber also happened to be a guest on. Beliebers everywhere uploaded the clip where the song played and Justin Bieber was chatting it up. Long story short, 10s of thousands of dollars were generated for this one copyright for the band that otherwise would have only received money for the actual airing or re-airing of the show.
As you can see, we have not even discussed the creation of new content for YouTube which deserves its own written piece. There is a lot of content just lying around waiting to be uploaded and monetized, in one form or another, with an audience waiting to consume like children and birthday cakes.
Authored by Quentin Bradley [Head of Product, Muserk]. He is based out of Nashville, TN, USA.
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